A recent research paper from Center of Creative Coaching for Leadership titled “The Challenges Leaders Face Around the World: More Similar than Different” explores the challenges facing leaders today.

The research found that senior management and executives wrestle with the following 6 leadership challenges:

Developing Managerial Effectiveness: The challenge of developing the relevant skills — such as time-management, prioritisation, strategic thinking, decision-making and getting up to speed with the job — to be more effective at work.

Inspiring Others: The challenge of inspiring or motivating others to ensure they are satisfied with their jobs and working smarter.

Developing Employees: The challenge of developing others, including mentoring and coaching.

Leading a Team: The challenge of team-building, team development and team management. Specific challenges include how to instill pride in a team or support the team, how to lead a big team and what to do when taking over a new team.

Guiding Change: The challenge of managing, mobilising, understanding and leading change. Guiding change includes knowing how to mitigate consequences, overcome resistance to change and deal with employees’ reaction to change.

Managing Internal Stakeholders and Politics: The challenge of managing relationships, politics and image. This challenge includes gaining managerial support and managing up and getting buy-in from other departments, groups or individuals.

Reflecting on this list of challenges it’s clear that we are struggling to adapt effectively to a Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity (VUCA) environment - the uncertain and fast changing times of today. We’re experiencing immense change at all levels of society. And this change is happening so fast that we often find ourselves struggling to keep up. Leadership styles and practices of the past are often no longer relevant. The result? Significant change that requires personal and corporate transformation to navigate successfully.

In times like these it comes as no surprise we’re seeking to build teams, inspire others, lead change and manage dynamic internal relationships and politics. The immense time pressures and the speed of change requires leaders to improve their strategic focus, decision-making processes and their personal effectiveness.

Enterprises who are not proactively addressing these challenges will be ill equipped to lead into the future. So there is an urgent need to develop people at all levels and prepare them for the competitive environment of tomorrow.

Reflecting on these top 6 challenges what are you doing in response?

Last week the CEO of Telstra David Thodey defined Leadership. David said that the things that make a good leader are the ability to execute and get things done, able to understand and feel the ebbs and flows of a business, understand the needs of the customer, have strategic insight and able to spot opportunities  ability to manage in ambiguity (not everything is black and white), have a understanding of emotional intelligence and lastly passion.

This got me thinking, what is your definition of leadership? Over the years I have read many books and attending seminars on leadership. I have found that only few people have a solid answer to this question. Few have a clear definition of what leadership means for them personally.

The definition of leadership has been a thorny issue for many years with each author approaching the topic from a different perspective. This is not to say that any of the definitions are right or wrong, rather each attempt exposes a different and valuable facet on what leadership means and how it’s expressed. Therefore it’s useful to explore the different definitions, perspective and viewpoints on leadership.

Leadership as Influence

These definitions describe leadership as a process of influencing others. It’s the ability of the leader to build relationships and influence people’s behaviour as required to execute the vision. The outcome of leadership is about changing the behaviour of people. This perspective of leadership is focused on inspiring and motivating others, with an emphasising the relationship between leaders and followers.

• “Leadership is influence – nothing more, nothing less.” – John Maxwell, The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership
• “Leadership is the incremental influence that a person has beyond his or her formal authority” – Vecchio
• “Leadership requires using power to influence the thoughts and actions of other people.” – Zalenik, A., Managers and Leaders: are they different?
• “Influencing people – by providing purpose, direction, and motivation – while operating to accomplish the mission and improving the organization.”  - US Army Manual
• “Leadership is the capacity to influence others through inspiration motivated by passion, generated by vision, produced by a conviction, ignited by a purpose.” – Dr. Myles Munroe, The Spirit of Leadership
• “Leadership is the art of influencing others to their maximum performance to accomplish any task, objective or project.” – William Alan Cohen, The Art of a Leader
• “Leadership is an influence relationship among leaders and followers who intend real changes that reflect their mutual purposes.” – Joseph Rost, Leadership in the 21st Century
• “Leadership is the process of influencing the activities of an individual or a group in efforts toward goal achievement in a given situation.” – Hersey, P., Blanchard, K., Dewey, E.J., Management of Organizational Behavior

Leadership as Change

These definitions describe leadership primarily as a process of change supported by social influence and persuasion. Change is central to effective leadership. The greater the change the greater the need for leadership. More change demands more leadership. Therefore leadership requires leaders develop vision and future direction, to influence people to move towards the vision to achieve a shared goal.

• “Leadership is the ability to step outside the culture to start evolutionary change processes that are more adaptive.”  - Edgar Schein
• “Leadership defines what the future should look like, aligns people with that vision, and inspires them to make it happen despite the obstacles.” – John Kotter, Leading Change
• “Leadership is a process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal.” – Northouse, P. G., Leadership: Theory and Practice
• “Leadership is the art of mobilizing others to want to struggle for shared aspirations.” –  Kouzes, J.M. and Posner, B.Z., The Leadership Challenge
• “Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.” – Warren G. Bennis
• “Leadership is the process of persuasion or example by which an individual (or leadership team) induces a group to pursue objectives held by the leader or shared by the leader and his or her followers” – John W. Gardner, On Leadership
• “Leadership is the capacity of individuals to spark the capacity of a human community – people living and working together – to bring forth new realities.” – Peter Sense

Leadership as Service

Then there the definitions of leadership as being about service to others usually referred to as “servant leadership”. This perspective of leadership speaks to the motives and intentions of the leader, proposing that effective leaders act from the desire to be of service to others.

• “Leadership is about service to others and a commitment to developing more servants as leaders. It involves co-creation of a commitment to a mission.” – Robert Greenleaf
• “The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between the two, the leader must become a servant and a debtor. That sums up the progress of an artful leader.” – Max DePree
• “All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.” – John Kenneth Galbraith

Leadership as Character

There are definitions leadership that refer to the importance of the leader’s character for effective leadership. These recognise the important of integrity, trust and the character of the leader. This is the recognition that without character and integrity, people will not trust the leader and without trust leaders cannot influence others to follow them on a journey of change.

• “Leadership is a combination of strategy and character. If you must be without one, be without the strategy.” – General H. Norman Schwarzkopf
• “Leadership: The capacity and will to rally people to a common purpose together with the character that inspires confidence and trust” – Field Marshal Montgomery
• “Leadership is not a person or a position. It is a complex moral relationship between people, based on trust, obligation, commitment, emotion, and a shared vision of the good.” – Joanne Ciulla

Leadership as Development

There a a number of definitions of leadership that focus on the responsibility of the leader to grow and develop others into leaders. They highlight the importance of knowing and expressing who you are as a leader. These definitions recognise the need for the personal development of the leader and their constituents so they are able to effectively deal with the challenges of change brought about by a challenging vision.

• “The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.” – Ralph Nadar
• “Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.” – Jack Welch
• “If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.” — John Quincy Adams, American 6th US President (1825-29)
• “Leadership is a function of knowing yourself, having a vision that is well communicated, building trust among colleagues, and taking effective action to realize your own leadership potential.” – Warren Bennis

The above definitions provide an overview of some of the most widely reference definitions of leadership.

What’s Your Personal Definition of Leadership?

As you would have noticed from the collection of leadership definitions above that there is no one single definition of leadership. There are as many definitions of leadership as there are leaders. This is a good thing. It recognises that leadership is deeply personal and a topic to be wrestled with by each of us as we prepare to lead. Leaders are unique and each leader needs a personal definition of leadership that guides and inspires them. Unless we understand what we mean by leadership it becomes difficult to select, develop and grow leaders.

As leadership is personal and unique to the individual, having your own personal definition provides an anchor for your role as leader. Your definition of leadership affects how you think about your role, how you act, your relationship with others and ultimately your results.

If you don’t as yet have a personal definition of leadership take some time over the next week to develop one that’s your own. I would suggest the following process to create your own personal definition of leadership:

1. Review the definitions listed previously as a source of inspiration. Highlight those that resonate with you personally.
2. Start a conversation with your peers and others on how they define leadership. Use these conversations to stimulate and challenge your own thinking.
3. Work on and revise your personal definition as you go.
4. Your personal definition should create awareness for you concerning to your role as leader and help you answer the question, “How do I know when I’m leading?”.

I look forward to reading in the comments people's own definition of leadership.

Putting leadership development at the heart of a major operations-improvement effort paid big dividends for a global industrial company.

Few companies can avoid big, periodic changes in the guts of their business. Whatever the cause—market maturation, a tough macroeconomic environment, creeping costs, competitive struggles, or just a desire to improve—the potential responses are familiar: restructure supply chains; rethink relationships among sales, marketing, and other functions; boost the efficiency of manufacturing or service operations (or sometimes close them). Such changes start at the top and demand a relentless focus on nitty-gritty business details from leaders up and down the line.

Too often, however, senior executives overlook the “softer” skills their leaders will need to disseminate changes throughout the organization and make them stick. These skills include the ability to keep managers and workers inspired when they feel overwhelmed, to promote collaboration across organizational boundaries, or to help managers embrace change programs through dialogue, not dictation.

One global industrial company tackled these challenges by placing leadership development at the center of a major operational-improvement program that involved deploying a new production system across 200 plants around the world. While the need for operational change was clear—the performance of the company’s factories was inconsistent and in many cases far below that of competitors in terms of efficiency, productivity, and cost—so too were the organizational obstacles. Drives for improvement, for example, carried a stigma of incompetence; current performance was considered “good enough”; conflict tended to be passive-aggressive or was avoided entirely; and shop floor employees felt that they were treated as cogs and that their supervisors were enforcers. The effect of all this on employees was disengagement, a lack of trust in senior management, and a pervasive fear of making mistakes—a worry reinforced by the company’s strong culture of safety and of risk aversion.

These challenges were impossible to ignore, and that was probably a blessing in disguise: the senior team had to look beyond technical improvements and focus on helping the company’s leaders to master the personal behavioral changes needed to support the operational ones. To that end, the company mounted an intense, immersive, and individualized leadership program.1

The results are still unfolding, but after three years the company estimates that the improvement program has already boosted annual pretax operating income by about $1.5 billion a year. Furthermore, executives see the new leadership behavior as crucial to that ongoing success. Indeed, the senior executive who launched the program believes that without the inclusion of leadership development, it would have made only half the impact it actually did. She adds that the company has seen a tenfold return on its investment in each of the dozens of leaders trained thus far.

Scenes from the front lines of change In this article, we’ll share the stories of three such leaders and examine how the changes they made in their leadership styles contributed to improved business results. Then we’ll step back and offer a few general leadership-development principles that we hope will be useful to other organizations contemplating large-scale, transformational changes.

Making sourcing more efficient An executive we’ll call Annie is the company’s director of sourcing and logistics. Her charge: to help the sourcing operation improve its performance, from the mid- to the first quartile, without additional resources. Annie and her supervisor (the group’s vice president) concluded that the way to achieve this goal was to create a single global sourcing system instead of relying on the existing patchwork of regional and divisional ones. This approach would improve efficiency, take advantage of cheaper sources, and cut interaction costs.

But that meant engaging a global group of stakeholders, many of whom preferred acting independently. Some even mistrusted one another. The vice president knew that this problem would be very difficult for Annie; as he put it, “she used to move too fast, and people would miss her train.” Somehow, Annie had to build the skills—and quickly—to engage her colleagues on a journey where turning back was not an option.

Annie realized she needed to engage them not just intellectually but also emotionally, so they would become committed to the new approach and understand why it was better, even though many saw it as threatening to their autonomy and their ability to tailor services to local needs. Annie also recognized that she had a strong tendency to do all the work herself to ensure that it was done quickly and correctly. Learning to overcome that inclination would help her to articulate a more inspiring vision and bring more people on board. Along with a colleague who was going through leadership training at the same time, Annie worked on a number of skills, such as how to keep discussions focused on solutions and how to build on existing strengths to overcome resistance. She also developed 20 coaching vignettes, which helped her bring to life the mind-sets and behavior that had to change. These moves helped Annie establish the new vocabulary she needed to encourage colleagues to identify and eliminate issues that were getting in the way of the new sourcing approach.

As more than 1,000 employees across four regions adopted the new system, operational efficiencies quickly started to appear. What’s more, the effort encouraged interpersonal interactions that helped some employees overcome long-standing barriers to collaboration. The vice president highlighted the way the effort had encouraged North American employees to begin openly addressing issues they had with colleagues at a logistics service center in India, for example, and to move beyond mistrusting the workers there and resenting them for holding “exported jobs.” Such engagement skills spread across the network and began to take hold.

As collaboration improved, the cost savings grew: within 18 months, the sourcing group had eliminated the need for 50 positions (and helped the workers who held them to get new jobs elsewhere in the company). In the same time period, benchmarking suggested that the group as a whole had achieved first-quartile performance levels. What’s more, the experience strengthened Annie as a manager. “My answer might have been right before,” she says, “but it got richer. . . . I feel more confident. It is not about needing to prove myself anymore. I have much greater range and depth of influence.”

Boosting yields at a factory Conor, as we’ll call one European plant manager, needed to boost yields using the company’s new production system. In the past, the industrial giant would have assigned engineers steeped in lean production or Six Sigma to observe the shop floor, gather data, and present a series of improvements. Conor would then have told plant employees to implement the changes, while he gauged the results—a method consistent with his own instinctive command-and-control approach to leadership. But Conor and his superiors quickly realized that the old way wouldn’t succeed: only employees who actually did the work could identify the full range of efficiency improvements necessary to meet the operational targets, and no attempt to get them to do so would be taken seriously unless Conor and his line leaders were more collaborative.

Workers were skeptical. A survey taken at about this time (in 2009) showed that plant workers saw Conor and his team as distant and untrustworthy. Moreover, the company couldn’t use salary increases or overtime to boost morale, because of the ongoing global economic crisis.

Conor’s leadership training gave him an opportunity to reflect on the situation and provided simple steps he could take to improve it. He began by getting out of his office, visiting the shop floor, and really listening to the workers talk about their day-to-day experiences, their workflows, how their machines functioned, and where things went wrong. They’d kept all this information from him before. He made a point of starting meetings by inviting those present to speak, in part to encourage the group to find collective solutions to its problems.

Conor explained: “As I shared what I thought and felt more openly, I started to notice things I had not been aware of, as other people became more open. We’d had the lean tools and good technology for a long time. Transparency and openness were the real breakthrough.” As the new atmosphere took hold, workers began pointing out minor problems and additional areas for improvement specific to their corners of the plant; within just a few months its yields increased to 91 percent, from 87 percent. Today, yields run at 93 percent.

Closing a plant Pierre, as we’ll call him, was managing a plant in France during the darkest days of the global financial crisis. His plant was soon to close as demand from several of its core customers went into a massive and seemingly irreversible tailspin. The company was in a tricky spot: it needed the know-how of its French workers to help transfer operations to a new production location in another country, and despite its customers’ problems it still had €20 million worth of orders to fulfill before the plant closed. Meanwhile, tensions were running high in France: other companies’ plant closures had sparked protests that in some cases led to violent reactions from employees. Given the charged situation, most companies were not telling workers about plant closures until the last minute.

Pierre was understandably nervous as he went through leadership training, where he focused intently on topics such as finding the courage to use honesty when having difficult conversations, as well as the value of empathic engagement. After a lengthy debate among company executives, Pierre decided to approach the situation with those values in mind. He announced the plant closing nine months before it would take place and was open with employees about his own fears. Pierre’s authenticity struck a chord by giving voice to everyone’s thoughts and feelings. Moreover, throughout the process of closing the plant, Pierre recounts, he spent some 60 percent of his time on personal issues, most notably working with his subordinates to assist the displaced workers in finding new jobs and providing them with individual support and mentoring (something other companies weren’t doing). He spent only about 40 percent on business issues related to the closure.

This honest engagement worked. Over the next nine months, the plant stayed open and fulfilled its orders, even as its workers ensured that their replacements in the new plant had the information they needed to carry on. It was the only plant in the industry to avoid violence and lockouts.

Lessons observed While every change program is unique, the experiences of the industrial company’s managers offer insights into many of the factors that, we find, make it possible to sustain a profound transformation. Far too often, leaders ask everyone else to change, but in reality this usually isn’t possible until they first change themselves.

Tie training to business goals. Leadership training can seem vaporous when not applied to actual problems in the workplace. The industrial company’s focus on teaching Pierre to have courageous conversations just as the ability to do so would be useful, for instance, was crucial as Pierre made arrangements to close his plant. In the words of another senior executive we spoke with, “If this were just a social experiment, it would be a waste of time. People need a ‘big, hairy goal’ and a context to apply these ideas.”

Build on strengths. The company chose to train managers who were influential in areas crucial to the overall transformation and already had some of the desired behavior—in essence, “positive deviants.” The training itself focused on personal mastery, such as learning to recognize and shift limiting mind-sets, turning difficult conversations into learning opportunities, and building on existing interpersonal strengths and managerial optimism to help broadly engage the organization.

Ensure sponsorship. Giving training participants access to formal senior-executive sponsors who can tell them hard truths is vital in helping participants to change how they lead. Moreover, the relationship often benefits the sponsor too. The operations vice president who encouraged Annie, for example, later asked her to teach him and his executive team some of the skills she had learned during her training.

Create networks of change leaders. Change programs falter when early successes remain isolated in organizational silos. To combat this problem, the industrial company deployed its leadership-development program globally to create a critical mass of leaders who shared the same vocabulary and could collaborate across geographic and organizational boundaries more effectively.

When Annie ran into trouble implementing the changes in some of the company’s locations in Asia, the personal network she’d created came to her rescue. A plant manager from Brazil, who had gone through the training with Annie, didn’t hesitate to get on a plane and spend a week helping the Asian supply chain leaders work through their problems. The company allowed him to do so even though this visit had nothing to do with his formal job responsibilities, thus sending an important signal that these changes were important.

Another tactic the company employed was the creation of formal “mini-advisory boards”: groups of six executives, with diverse cultural and business perspectives, who went through leadership training together. The mutual trust these teammates developed made them good coaches for one another. Pierre, for example, reported getting useful advice from his board as he finalized his plans to talk with his plant employees. The boards also provide much-needed emotional support: “The hardest part of being at the forefront of change is just putting your shoes on every day,” noted one manager we talked to. “Getting together helps me do that.”

"Commitment is what transforms a promise into reality. It is the words that speak boldly of your intentions. And the actions which speak louder than the words. It is making the time when there is none. Coming through time after time after time, year after year after year. Commitment is the stuff character is made of: the power to change the face of things. It is the daily triumph of integrity over skepticism."
-Shearson Lehman

Transforming organizational culture, building new competencies for leadership and communication, and coaching people to accomplish what they say they want to accomplish is a challenge to us all.

At the center of this is the notion of commitment—not just the word, the idea that commitment is a universal phenomenon and basic to all human coordination. Commitment is the foundation for any kind of intentional change.

From my perspective, there are two kinds of change in our everyday experience of living: that which we make happen (such as starting a business, creating a new market, producing unprecedented results or building a new product) and the kinds of change which seem to happen around us in the course of life itself (such as climate change, various “social” problems and shifts in fashion).

In the first instance, people are clearly committed to make something new happen. In the second instance, our choice is often to change ourselves in relationship to changes that we did not conceive or intend—to cope with or adapt to a “new reality”. In both instances, however, the key to accomplishment is our capacity to commit ourselves to creating something that did not exist for us previously—to invent new interpretations and practices for having our reality be consistent with our commitments.

On one hand, it can be argued that without commitment nothing will change, at least that we have anything to do with. We must accept whatever the circumstances of our lives give us and learn to cope effectively. For many, this leads to a kind of resignation and passive acceptance without real possibility for changing our world or ourselves.

On the other hand, if we only commit to what our common sense tells us is feasible and possible, we will, by definition, have more of the same because common sense is our collective understanding of the world based on past experience and practices.

Yet, anyone can identify dozens of examples of “realities” today that were unimaginable or made no sense only a few years ago and yet are becoming ordinary now. Consider the internet, cell phones, cloning, fax machines, the collapse of the Soviet Union, expanding political awareness, terrorism and the global economy as examples. Most of the people I meet in technological fields say they are working on solutions to problems that will be obsolete by the time they are implemented. At the current rate of knowledge expansion, we are rapidly approaching a time when almost anything we learn will be obsolete before we learn it.

In such a world, to organize our thinking and our actions around what has worked in the past—our common sense—is a formula for ever-increasing anxiety and failure to achieve our ambitions. I believe that some of the most pressing questions of our times relate to how to thrive and prosper in an increasingly unpredictable world.

Question’s we have about commitment:

• What is it?
• What does it mean to commit?
• How does our understanding of commitment shape our lives and possibilities?
• ·What are the consequences of making and keeping (or not keeping) commitments?
• What is our everyday relationship with commitments, our own and others?
• Most importantly, how can our commitments enhance our satisfaction in living, our effectiveness in accomplishing our ambitions and our capacity to empower ourselves and other human beings.

All human beings make commitments. Even the biggest procrastinator will recognize at some point he is committed to not making a decision. Sometimes we keep our commitments, and sometimes we don't. It has been argued that one of the things which distinguishes human beings from the rest of the animal kingdom is that we have the capacity to generate and act consistent with our commitments (while the behavior of animals is a function of instinct). Without commitment, we could not coordinate actions. We would not have institutions such as marriage; enterprises could not exist, even normal social interactions such as meeting someone for coffee would not occur. Life would be a random event. The future could never be more than a mechanistic extension of what has gone before and life, for the most part, would be circumstantially determined.

The capacity to commit may be the most distinguishing and constitutive aspect of our existence as human beings. In spite of this, the term ‘commitment' and what it refers to is transparent for most of us most of the time. Most of us agree that commitment is important, but live as though it is a mere convention and that outcomes are a function of forces and factors outside ourselves.

Commitment is an action. To commit is to bring something into existence that wasn't there before. At the moment of its coming into existence, a commitment is a creative act, distinct from whatever reasons or rationale we might have for making the commitment. This action is being taken by and between human beings all the time. Whether we are committing to meeting a friend or paying a bill or going to school, we are always moving within a fabric of conscious and unconscious commitments. The action of committing is also always connected to the future—to another action, event or result.

Commitment defines the relationship between a future that is entirely determined by historical circumstances and one that can be influenced, changed or created by human beings.   When we don't consciously commit or commit conditionally, we are in effect committed anyway—to the status quo.

The power of commitment is that it is the only action of which human beings are capable in which the future and the present appear in the same moment. When I promise to meet you, I am evoking the future time and circumstances of our meeting in the same moment as I speak the promise.

If we listen carefully to our own conversations and the conversations of others, we can notice that much of the time we are talking about our circumstances within the same perspective that we might observe a game or a movie. Our conversations are those of observers giving an account or telling a story about how we see or how we feel about our “reality”. We can often hear people speaking about “the way we are in Australia”, the problems of the economy or the society or within a particular company and why it is difficult to effect meaningful changes.

What is transparent, however, is that these conversations rarely result in new commitments to action. In other words, our conversations about what needs to be done or what needs to change don't, in and of themselves, change anything! We live in a kind of “cultural drift” in which we must learn to cope with historically determined circumstances with very little power to effect change or create a future that is discontinuous with the past.

An example of this can be seen when we speak with people in organizations and ask how much time is spent in meetings and how do people evaluate the value of meetings. Predictably, we will hear there are too many meetings and most of them are a waste of time. At the same time, most people are complaining that they lack the time to do many of the things which they say need to be done. The conclusion most often reached is to have fewer meetings. This is, in turn, followed by all the reasons we can't really have fewer meetings or why we can't have our meetings be more productive. The general mood becomes one of “resignation” until we simply accept or put up with the status quo and go through the motions of meetings without concern for or expectation that they can ever change.

Unfortunately, most of the work human beings do—in fact most of our lives—happens in meetings with other people. Consider, for example, that a telephone or email conversation is a kind of meeting, a sales call is a kind of meeting, and most planning occurs in meetings. Even social events or having a romantic dinner can be viewed as “meetings”.

Meetings are never a problem in and of themselves. We can all think of examples of meetings that were extraordinary, even life-changing.

What people are saying is that they spend too much time in meetings that are unproductive or unsatisfying. To a large extent, this is because people are speaking without commitment or they lack competency in resolving differences and having effective dialogue. If we ask ourselves what we are committed to making happen in the meeting—then organize our conversations around that commitment—we will begin to observe and experience a different meeting.

Not only do we empower ourselves as actors in the meeting (as opposed to reacting to what is said), but we also begin to listen differently to what is occurring and have many options not normally apparent.

The British writer George Bernard Shaw said, “Reasonable people adapt themselves to the circumstances. Unreasonable people adapt the circumstances to themselves. Progress depends on unreasonable people.”

This quotation highlights the dilemma that confronts us when we seriously consider making fundamental changes in how we live, how we work, our business culture and our practices for coordination. It suggests that if we expect anything to change, we need to be UNREASONABLE. More specifically, we need to make unreasonable commitments. If we only commit to what we think is reasonable or feasible, we are, by definition, making commitments to more of the same—to living in the cultural drift. “Reasons” are, by definition, products of past experience and common understandings for why things happen and what is or is not possible.

Being unreasonable is not the same as being unrealistic. Being unreasonable means acting in a manner that is inconsistent with conventional wisdom and common sense. Any example of significant change began with someone making a commitment to a possibility that was viewed as unreasonable or impossible at the time. Commitment is the difference between living in a context of responsibility for creating the future versus living in a context of reasonableness in which we must cope with whatever the circumstances give us.

One of the things I have learned is that people place a great deal of value on intelligence and knowledge. In a world that doesn't change or that changes very slowly, this value makes sense and is even practical since there is time to learn and apply what we know. In a world that is changing at exponential rates, however, conventional intelligence and knowledge are often obsolete before we have time to apply them. If we need proof or established acceptance of knowledge before we act, then it is often too late and our competitors have gone on to something else. We become intelligent and knowledgeable followers.

Intelligence and knowledge may inform what we commit to, but in themselves change nothing. The only thing that changes anything is commitment and action —intelligence and knowledge are not action. At best, they are a potential for action. At worst, they are a source of cognitive blindness and arrogance. In today's world, we must be willing and able to commit to possibility and action based on our vision and a view of what is needed to fulfil that vision.

Knowledge must become a by-product of commitment rather than a prerequisite for making commitment. Intelligence is being redefined as something like having the capacity for change.

Almost any discussion of how to effect changes—either personally or in an organizational context will provoke a degree of skepticism or even cynicism about pop psychology, management “fashions”, or self-help and consulting “gurus”. This cynical orientation usually results in either trivializing or discounting any possibility or the value of new proposals and approaches to change.

In other words, the problems associated with effecting meaningful changes in our lives and in our organizations are aggravated by the culture's tendency to reject whatever might make a difference.

Our actions, in turn, will correlate with how the world occurs for us. Since our actions are producing whatever circumstances we have, we inevitably find ourselves in a self-referential and self-fulfilling relationship with our view of our world. When people recognize this for themselves, they recover the capacity to be responsible for their point of view as just their point of view. When this occurs, people can interact with others in new ways, have different conversations, make authentic commitments, take new and unprecedented actions and thereby change or even transform their “reality”.

Commitment is a phenomenon that can be experienced and observed. We can remember that when we are committed we have a different mood, we observe and listen differently, we “feel” different than we do when we aren't committed or are not aware of our commitments. We can hear someone speak a promise and listen to what they say as being a commitment. When we see a great performance or accomplishment we often say that the person is really committed to what they are doing. In this sense, we define commitment as a source of action and accomplishment.

Commitment is also an action itself. Commitment doesn't occur until a human being expresses the commitment either by speaking or by doing something intentionally and directly. Commitment is choice. Commitment is the primary cause. Commitments don't refer to action; they are actions that transform one's relationship to the present and the past. Commitment is an action in language. I distinguish commitment as conscious action in the present moment. I cannot make a commitment yesterday and I cannot make a commitment tomorrow (until tomorrow comes).

From the perspective of commitment as an action, we could conclude that the answer to creating change to living a more productive and satisfying life and being more responsible is captured in the Nike slogan, “Just do it”. Most will agree, however, that knowing what to do and doing it are not the same. Cultures are constituted to persist. The nature of this persistence can be heard in the rationale or conversations we have about why we don't “just commit” and then do whatever it takes to fulfill our commitments.

If we have learned anything in the past 15 years of global competition, it is that we can no longer rely on a few leaders at the top of an organization to direct and control the work of everyone else. The whole concept of “empowerment” is based in the practical recognition that an enterprise cannot survive without everyone involved self-generating results based in their own intelligence and commitments.

“Until one is committed there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meeting and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe's couplets: 'Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.'”

W.H. Murray, the leader of the Scottish Expedition to Mt. Everest

Coaching has been and still is a passion I hold close to me. Traditional management of "command and control" has serious limitations in a world that is changing rapidly. Organizational "culture" is becoming a central concern for leaders and managers and recognized it as the phenomenon that could either impede or facilitate the kinds of changes that are necessary to maintain progress and effectiveness in what is a global economy.

The term "coaching" has become a catchall buzzword encompassing all kinds of consulting, counseling and management concepts and activities. Coaching is in fashion!

Unfortunately, as with any idea that becomes popular, the underlying potential of "coaching" as a new paradigm of management and leadership can be diluted and become a distinction without a difference. Specifically, the word is often now used as a metaphor or sometimes synonymous with supervision, counseling, mentoring, and the traditional role of manager.

Most of us know from personal experience that a relationship with a coach is not the same as a relationship with a traditional manager. We know from experience that we listen and respond differently to a coach and we are often empowered to accomplish more with a coach than we accomplish when relating to a traditional manager. It is not surprising that historically in virtually every field of human endeavor where performance is the objective, "coaching" has been an integral aspect of the design of the game and the more professional the players, the greater the demand for coaching.

The need to create "coaching cultures" in our organizations is more pressing than ever. This is because a coaching culture is based on distinguishing, empowering and coordinating individual commitment and action.

The need to clarify and integrate coaching competencies into our existing roles as leaders and managers is essential. The reason for this is that in most organizations today, leaders no longer have the luxury of time or the capability to maintain the illusion that they "control" the decision-making and actions of the people who work in the enterprise.

Coaching is not a replacement for solid management skills, but a new context, a new way of observing and relating to people and action --- a different way of being.

From a perspective of action, coaching and leadership are virtually synonymous. Both the coach and the leader are always engaged with other people, they work exclusively in a medium of relationship and conversations, and they are both working to create through others a "future" that is unpredictable and unprecedented. For coaches and leaders, the future isn't a goal, it is a reality NOW and their job is to bring forth what is missing or what needs to be eliminated so that their vision can be manifested in the world.

Learning to "be a coach" or "be a leader" requires more than appropriating new techniques or understanding a new model. It requires a fundamental shift in how one observes their world, themselves and other human beings. This shift begins when we consider that all human beings normally behave and act based on how our world "occurs" for us, not because of the "way it is". For example, we can all find situations in our own experience where our actions were inconsistent with what we "knew' to be the case such as in continuing to smoke, running away from something because we were afraid even though no real threat existed or making a decision which we knew to be wrong at the time, but rationalized or justified making it anyway.

As a premise, we could say that coaching enables people to change the way the world "occurs" for them. When this happens, there are possibilities and actions available that are not available otherwise. We often hear organizational leaders speaking about the need to change people's "mindsets", to get "buy-in" to some radical new approach or to overcome historical ways of working. We can also see myriad examples of frustration and costs associated with trying to explain, justify, or rationally argue for change only to find that people are more often than not acting and behaving in the same ways they did previously.

The key to creating a "coaching culture" or any new culture is in exploring the phenomenon of commitment. If our reality is a function of our actions and our actions are a function of our commitments and we only commit to what is reasonable and feasible, then we will obviously be generating more of the same.

It is not possible to coach someone or for that matter to be coached in the absence of authentic commitment. I distinguish commitment here from wanting, wishing, trying, hoping or any other notion such as "what is realistic" that we sometimes substitute for commitment.

It isn't practical or logical to coach someone who isn't committed to accomplishing something "unprecedented" in his or her experience. Coaching is inherently about achieving breakthroughs and a breakthrough is something that hasn't occurred before - a new level of competency or new action or unprecedented result.

Commitment is a phenomenon that while clear in almost everyone's direct experience when it is present, is generally unexamined and somewhat mysterious in everyday living. Two basic premises in our work is the view that:
a) everyone is always committed to something whether they are aware of it or not and
b) often our commitments are cultural in nature, that is we've become committed to interpretations and practices given us from the past and relate to them as "truths" without rigorous examination or choice.

In a coaching culture, the commitments to the future come first and then the planning is about how to accomplish or deliver on those commitments. One must be willing to authentically commit to a breakthrough BEFORE there is evidence that it can be accomplished or it can never be accomplished except as a consequence of "good luck" or some other circumstantial explanation.

Specifically, we might summarize the competencies of coaches (or leaders) as involving the following elements. A coach:

• Commits to and builds powerful, committed and trusting relationships
• Is grounded in an awareness of and responsibility for their own "blind spots"
• Grants total freedom, choice and power to those they coach --- is vulnerable
• Is more committed to the others commitments and results than the person being coached is --- an unreasonable stand FOR the other person
• Generates bigger possibilities for breakthroughs and accomplishment
• Is focused on listening for commitment and action
• Observes the others behavior and conversations for inconsistencies with the stated commitment or possibility, often revealing unexamined commitments and beliefs
• Formulates and offers interpretations and practices to align actions and commitment in a context of the organization's vision and values
• Manages conversations and moods of people involved in the game is able to "generate" new conversations to displace old ones and doesn't fix people, but allows them to be responsible for their own moods and interpretations.
• Uses breakdowns, constraints, adversity, mistakes or undesirable results as "positive" information and as "assets" for improving performance or as raw material for creative inquiry and design of new processes and practices
• "Comes from" the point of view that the results have already been accomplished and has a creative relationship with the future --- does not play the game to cope with circumstance or find out what will happen --- is inventing the future
• Operates with clarity and consistency of his or her own commitments and "walks the talk" at all times --- speaks and listens commitment
• Maintains an active relationship and dialogue with his or her own coach --- "pushes the envelope" of their own thinking, actions and accomplishment

These practices aren't unique or limited to only a context of coaching. They tend to occur naturally in highly responsible leaders and people broadly in times of crisis. I believe they are present in many instances of great accomplishment and leadership.

These are "contextual competencies" in that they all relate to distinguishing what is missing or what is occurring in the background of a situation. One question that has particular relevance to organizations, however, is "can they be systematically learned or are they simply natural qualities that one must be 'born with', acquire through fortuitous circumstances of life, or appear only when there is an organizational crisis?"

The answer is clearly "yes". These competencies can be systematically learned and mastered. Qualities and abilities such as committed listening, having compassion, living as one's word, being responsible, generating trust, creating possibilities and so forth are obviously desirable and often attributable to others --- however, they can be elusive when we try to learn them ourselves or teach them to others.

These kinds of qualities and abilities all have to do with our way of being, with who we are as committed human beings. Normally, when attempting to develop these qualities in others, we are often perceived as "preaching" them as virtues.

Knowledge and pre-existing processes can be taught. Ways of Being or "contextual competencies" can be coached. Learning to be a coach is primarily to learn a different way of Being. When this occurs, the above competencies are obviously appropriate and with practice tend to develop quickly and naturally.

If the focus shifts to "what are people's commitments" and "how are they 'seeing' their situation", it becomes obvious that many other interpretations are possible such as, "success depends on satisfying customers and other stakeholders including our families". In this context there isn't a problem, just a commitment and other questions such as "how do I satisfy all my stakeholders in the time I am committed to working. This in turn will often reveal new strategies, missing competencies and networks of people who might help. A new context or cultural "opening" doesn't proscribe action or solve problems, but leads to new thinking and actions depending upon the commitments of those involved.

Creating a "coaching culture" involves a multi-faceted strategy.

Being Responsible for the "Box". This involves various methods for displaying or "showing" the existing culture. This is the "box" often referred to when challenging people to "get out of their box". This is more than simple description and is the result of questioning conventional wisdom and revealing AS CULTURE many of the hallway conversations and points of view that are widely shared within the organization but rarely addressed.

For example, if we ask, "what does everybody know about the way things get done around here", people will begin to articulate this conventional wisdom such as "you must get the boss's permission before you do something or you will be punished". This kind of generalized belief can persist even when the boss has encouraged risk-taking and independent action.

The result of this step is the recognition that our culture is not a problem but is the phenomenon that blinds us to possibilities and actions that would allow us to create an "unpredictable" future.

Creating a bigger Game. It is important for the leadership of the organization to undertake a serious learning process and open themselves to being coached with respect to "what is the future we are committed to creating?". This usually is in the form of an organizational vision, but not one created as a "picture of the future" but as a ground of being from which to organize and align actions on a day-to-day basis.

The result of this step is the alignment of the top team on the "game we are playing" and an authentic commitment to learning and changing themselves as appropriate. They are committed to "walking the talk" and demonstrating new ways of being as models for the rest of the organization.

Walking the Talk. To anchor the foundation and sustain "new ways of being" requires a company solidify its new culture through design of processes and practices consistent with this new worldview.

Coaching isn't a onetime relationship or intervention. In most fields, the more competent and more professional a player, the more their demand for and reliance on coaching. In a coaching culture, coaching isn't a role, but the practicing of coaching competencies in every situation. Everyone is open to both giving and receiving coaching as appropriate to their abilities and concerns. My partner Karen is my coach in some domains and I am her coach in others.

Coaching is a partnership between human beings in which one person can empower another to accomplish more than is possible on their own. When commitment and actions are aligned, the coach is able to assist in creating larger and larger possibilities and learning becomes an "upward creative spiral".

Continuous Learning. Creating culture is to continuously transfer coaching capabilities and responsibilities through continuous learning and through the organization's practices for recruiting and for moving people between jobs, including transferring accountability when people retire.

In a coaching culture, everything that everyone is doing comes down to:
a) What am I committed to accomplishing.
b) With whom am I coordinating commitments.
c) What do I see is missing or in the way to fulfilling our commitments.
d) What possibilities and actions am I committed to now?

In a coaching culture the organization is seen as a network of people coordinating commitments for the sake of accomplishing a common future.

The "coaching approach" allows an organization to get at what is beneath all the things that are traditionally in the way of becoming the organization that they want to be. It goes beyond addressing symptoms or problems or putting a band-aid on what is wrong.

Coaching creates sustainable positive changes in "the way things are". The ontological underpinnings of this approach, which deals with the nature of being, allow people to experience themselves and their world more directly and have a more responsible relationship with whatever they see is limiting them.

In a coaching culture an environment is created in which context is just as important as content and becomes the main lever for creating a future that is not already constrained by the past. Coaches accomplish this by distinguishing all the background "conversations" that usually stop people and keep them trapped in their reasons for not having what they say they want.

"Coaching competencies" are the practices that allow a person to be effective in the domain of context or culture. Coaching an organization's members to learn them in practice and move toward mastery in these areas leads to having an organizational culture where commitment to clarity and results in more important than the historical and unexamined attachment to reasons, justifications, control and predictable outcomes.

Creating a coaching culture is the fastest and most sustainable strategy for an organization committed to continuously reinventing itself and for being successful in a complex and globally interconnected world characterized by constant and unpredictable change.